A database for the study of the printing privilege system in early modern Europe
Authors
Andrea Ottone
, Marius Buning
, Alberto José Campillo Pardo
, Alica-Nana Citron
This paper discusses the theoretical premises, the operative functions, and the publishing perspectives of a database on early modern printing privileges. This database has been developed within the framework of the "Before Copyright" project, funded by the European Research Council and pursued at the Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History of the University of Oslo. Although initially focused on book history, this project aims to contribute to fields of study such as intellectual history, legal history and legal theory. The theoretical premise is that printing privileges, aside from being an instrument of commercial promotion, also served as means through which territorial states interfered in cultural and intellectual dynamics by filtering whole fields of knowledge. In order to build an interpretative model around this hypothesis, a relational database was created to manage a vast amount of data. The said database will be used to fragment and reaggregate data according to multiple logical and investigative purposes. The dataset, which includes bibliographical, geographical and biographical elements, is derived from a vast number of printing privileges spanning from 1470s to circa 1800. The ante quem terminus is set at a period of time when the printing privilege system began to decline, eventually being replaced by modern copyright law.
